The Reverend Samuel Peters’s Natural History: A Reassessment

Abstract

This article provides a reassessment from the perspective of folklore studies of the natural history section of Samuel Peters’s General History of Connecticut (1781). Peters was an Anglican priest and Loyalist who fled the Colony of Connecticut for London prior to the American Revolution. His General History has long been disparaged in the United States as propaganda and falsehood, including his report on the animals of Connecticut. Still others have regarded him as a ‘Munchausen’ or inventor of fantastical creatures. This article examines the entirety of the natural history section to argue that Peters was both sincere in his attempt to describe the animals and actively recorded local folklore concerning them.